Horse Buggy, Goat Pens, Sickness, and Almost Easter

Friday after school one of Jesse's Priests' Quorum leaders picked him up for an activity ... in this:

And then they spent several hours breaking up concrete with sledgehammers for the bishop.

Did I mention they made knives earlier in the week? And spent an evening last month packaging meat in a ward member's backyard meat packing establishment??

We're not in Kansas anymore, kids. (Or perhaps that's exactly where we are.) 

In other news, Mike was having trouble finding the breed of pig he wanted to get for the kids to raise for the fair, so they decided on goats. (Ah goats! Have you compared the smell of their pens to the smell of pig pens? It's enough to make you love them.)

This morning we went to the farm to measure some things to get their pen ready. (This granary/goat shelter? was from Mike's Uncle Jodie.)

Then we went to IFA to buy all the supplies. (And to get some farm overalls for me and, for the kids who needed them, some muck boots [rain boots, but, you know, for mucking around].)

And then Anders and I had a special appointment set to go to the temple together to do baptisms for the dead! Just the two of us! For some distant relatives I'd felt a miraculous hand in connecting with!

But instead, Anders began feeling violently ill and started throwing up as we drove back from IFA. So I took him home and spent the next few hours cleaning up repeated bouts of throw up and diarrhea while the others went back to work on goat stuff at the farm. 

And if that's not just how life goes then I don't know what is. 

My sisters and I had been texting a bit about our Easter weekends. Happy things. Kids in town. Vacations. New grandbabies. New goats. Accomplishments of children. Cheery photos of all these moments. And all those things were real. But also ... cleaning up my bathroom for 45 minutes from a violently ill child when I'd hoped to be at the temple was real. 

As I was telling one of my teens the other day (in regard to things far more complex than throw up): life is messy. It isn't tidy and simple. We make really awful mistakes. People we love do. We harm each other. We have hard hard things happen to us. It's fallen mortality. And amazing things and really really complicated and painful stuff exist all mingled together. 

But, though I might have liked Easter weekend to have only been the joyous things my sisters and I were sharing, the real reason I celebrate Easter is that I wholly trust a God who turns all of this mess to good in us and for us, who lets us become full of character and compassion and hope through the failures and the painful, and who has already paved the path for every bit of it to be mended and healed and overcome. All of it. I'm sure of that. That's just how great He is. And how much power He has. And how much He understands. And how much He loves us and knows how to guide us through. And I am so so glad that He is who I have yoked myself to and can depend on and get to even try and be a servant for. I love him so SO much. And perhaps, no, certainly, without all this complex and hard and painful and impossibly messy, I would never ever have known how great my Savior truly is, or how much I truly love Him, or how lucky I am to know He is who I follow and who I get to rely on and hope in.

"And the Lord gave them rest round about. ... There failed not ought of any good thing which the Lord had spoken unto the house of Israel; all came to pass."